This invention relates to cooking ovens, and more specifically relates to a novel pressure cooking oven which has internal heating sources which can brown foodstuff during pressure cooking.
It is known that if the cooking time required for an oven to cook foodstuff can be reduced, the energy required to perform a particular cooking task will be reduced. Microwave ovens reduce cooking time substantially as compared to that required for a conventional thermal oven, but microwave ovens can produce taste shifts of the foodstuff which is cooked. Pressure cooking also reduces cooking time without taste shifts but, in the conventional pressure cooker, one cannot obtain browning and crisping of the foodstuff. If the foodstuff is pre-browned before cooking in a pressure cooker, the result is a "mushy" surface at best.
Conventional pressure cookers consist simply of a pressurized vessel. An external heat source is used to heat the vessel thereby boiling water internally to produce pressurizing steam and also to produce the cooking energy. Commonly, the pressure cooker will be placed on a conventional kitchen range (if it will fit on the range) and the range heating element serves as the heat source. If the pressure vessel is large, it cannot be used with some standard ranges. For example, a standard twenty-two quart pressure cooker cannot be accommodated by the standard hi-lo range made by General Electric. The need for an externally applied source of heat to the conventional pressure cooker also necessarily wastes energy due to the heating of non-essential masses which surround the pressure cooking vessel.